this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Yeah Alphabet is uh really really really stupid for losing their user loyalty when competitors in the search field like Kagi exist.
It’s truly shocking how a tiny company of a few people can outperform one of the largest companies in the world with search. Google is full of ads though, so it’s more profitable for them if you have to spend more time on their page to see more ads.
That's exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it's pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you're looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It's why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can't get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.
Now those quick results can't be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don't feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.
And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
While I'd highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.
The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.
The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan's previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.
Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it's important that we know who's making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.
It was strange being there at the dawn of time, to see Google utterly displace Yahoo.
We were on conenctions barely faster than dial up and Yahoo's homepage was a complete clusterfuck of everything you didn't care about. Weather for somewhere else, celebrity "news", sports in another country. And all you wanted to do was look up a way to run some very dangerous unchecked SQL in PHP.
Google was just search. Nothing else. And it was so fast. You could have that potential SQL injection so much faster there.
And the sad thing is with phones and browsers defaulting to it, and even the word "googling" (I don't remember ever Yahooing anything), it's probably here to stay with it's terrible addiction to ads and AI. Won't be long before I'm served glue at a pizzeria.
And you could do Google searches from the terminal too, life was just a little slower back then
Ed is the best addition to the CZM family since Garrison, no shade to James, Magpie, or Jaime Loftus
I don't know, it kind of makes sense, since Kagi can tailor itself to a specific audience, whereas something big like Google will just make a generalised slop that is able to be used by anyone, but isn't to anyone's particular tastes.
While Kagi does have a very specific audience in mind, I’m not convinced specialization vs generalization is a reason for a difference. Google also tailors ads for the audience, using information they have collected on you, people similar to you, as well as general time of day, current events, etc. It’s more that google wants you on their site for longer, Kagi wants you to find your result and move on, since the more you search the more it costs them.
As somebody that's a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.
While I'd say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it's also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.
Of course, that's because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don't even use your general location to prioritize results. It's an interesting balancing act and I'm not quite sure they've hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I'm happy with the overall experience currently.
Yep, I have Kagi set as my default, but if I’m searching for places nearby or current events, I usually end up back on google. But 90+% of my search queries stay on Kagi which is impressive enough. In the past I’ve tried DuckDuckGo and always switched back in part because the results quality was very bad.